QUARK INVESTMENT RESEARCH REPORTING SOLUTION

Investment Research in the Digital Age

We live in the era of now. Your customers want to access your investment research whenever they want, wherever they are, and on whatever device they choose. Now they can. The Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution streamlines the process of creating investment research and delivering it to PDF, email, the Web, tablets, smartphones and beyond so analysts can focus on what they’re best at: creating insights that drive transactions. Go Everywhere.

Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution

Features

Create Up-to-the-minute Research Opinions and Advice

Delivering the right information to the right client at the right time will shape your customer's experience. The Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution is a tightly integrated set of software components that brings research reporting to the digital age. By moving from a traditional to a dynamic publishing approach, costs are reduced and the process is streamlined to enable personalized, interactive and timely research opinions from a single source of content.

Instant Multi-Channel Publishing

Automate research reports to be assembled with the appropriate sizing, formatting, personalization and interactivity for each client and their preferred media. Then publish instantly to print, PDF, email, Web content, HTML5, tablet and smartphone apps as well as third-party content aggregators.

Integrates Local, Remote and Offshore Analysts

Whether planned or crisis-driven, returning from a local client meeting or on assignment abroad, analysts can easily and securely author narrative content. Remote analysts can collaborate with office-based colleagues since all analysts and stakeholders are fully integrated into the review and approval processes, irrespective of their location.

Advanced Authoring Capabilities

With a range of authoring options including Microsoft Word, Web-based and mobile users benefit from a rich desktop writing environment and lightweight tools for analysts on-the-go. Financial report writing is made more efficient by empowering analysts to no longer spend time on formatting or error-prone copy and paste routines, but instead create reusable, structured content. On-demand previews enable authors to publish research opinions with confidence by seeing how they will look in each conceivable media, from PDFs to Interactive tablet apps.

Automation of Routine Editorial Tasks

Editorial review is a necessary step in the research publishing process, typically handled through one or more labor-intensive steps. Quark’s advanced content structuring technology reduces repetitive editorial effort through automated rule-based content scanning. Now, supervisory analysts can confirm adherence to established corporate style guides as opposed to hunting for content violations. Free up the editorial process to focus on value-added edits and not recurring and tiresome corrections. Ensure that content adheres to the company’s style guide with word usage validation and content rules.

Richer Interactive Experiences

In addition to desktop and laptop computers, mobile adoption is exploding — the iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire, Surface, Android tablets, smartphones, and hundreds more. PDFs are no longer good enough. With the Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution, analysts can include text, graphics, tables, charts, real-time financial information, videos, slideshows, podcasts and more to provide clients with richer, interactive investment research that’s appropriate for the device they’re using.

Easy Integration with Third-Party Platforms

The Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution uses the latest Web technologies to enable easy and secure integration with everything from Microsoft Excel to complex business infrastructures. Connect to third-party data services or distribute research to content aggregators using standards such as RIXML, as well as integrating with social media tools.

Research Personalization

Create and market content for specific target audiences in order to meet varying compliance requirements and information needs. Tag content that is intended for an individual, group or client (company level) and then automatically filter content during the publishing process to any media type. Narrative content can be identified at the phrase, sentence, paragraph or section level.

Component-Level Workflow and Content Lifecycle Control

Advanced content management capabilities track and manage text and rich media content at a component level. In the case of narrative content this can be down to an individual word level if required. Content components can be reused across multiple documents and media, replacing copy and paste and providing robust content lifecycle controls to ensure accuracy and compliance. Reporting provides real-time information on where all content components are currently being used and tracks when changes are made and who made them.

Automated Regulatory Compliance Checks

Traditional processes use manual techniques that leave too much room for error, slow down the publishing process and drive up compliance costs. With the Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution, research departments can automate routine tasks such black and gray list identification and any necessary disclosures. The accuracy of investment information can be assured, such as historical data and legal statements. Hidden compliance workflows can also be incorporated as required.

Content Security

Restrict editing rights on individual document components based on user access rights. Track version history of all content and see who edited what and when. Further, through component control and metadata assignment, entitlement rights can be managed at a very granular level. As research publishing moves from the monolithic PDF to the digital paragraph, security needs to be managed with much more precision and foresight. Quark’s component content management system is the ideal platform to enable research publishing content security with extreme flexibility. It also integrates with existing internal user authentication systems.

Interactive Charts and Tables

Integrate tables and charts with real-time financial data such as streaming stock information. Remove repetitive manual work by automatically creating graphically rich charts and info-graphics. Bring data to life with interactive charts and tables that clients can visualize and manipulate directly on their digital devices.

Social Media Linking

Leverage social media such as LinkedIn and Twitter to both source and publish research opinions. See what’s trending, be part of the conversation and connect clients with analysts all while staying on the right side of compliance requirements.

Rich Metadata

A customizable user interface enables analysts to easily associate required and optional metadata with a report. Metadata can also be automatically populated based on known information about an analyst and information contained within a report. By applying metadata down to an individual word level, a high degree of granularity can be attained for content reuse, indexing, search and search engine optimization (SEO).

Readership Tracking

Know what research and opinions interest each client and use this to drive content personalization and future research planning. By connecting content delivery to CRM systems you can not only see readership patterns but understand the needs of specific clients including which research is being consumed, the interest in interactive content, video consumption and more.

Professional Design Capabilities

Differentiate your research brand using all the rich functionality of award-winning professional page layout and design software. Research report templates benefit from WYSIWYG design tools, precision typography, advanced color management and interactive features for adding slideshows, video, and more to enhance your research products. Quark's design templates, a unique feature, among all vendors, provide an ability to deliver research reports directly to smart, mobile devices all through automation.

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Benefits

Lower Cost Structure

Automate the research production process and reduce the time and cost of creating and publishing investment research by up to 85%. By integrating best-in-class research authoring software, you can reduce internal development and support costs and support the latest technologies and digital devices.

Reduce Risk

Implement compliance automation to reduce the time and cost of meeting burgeoning compliance and regulatory requirements. Minimize organizational and individual risk while streamlining the content and legal review processes to ensure tracked signoff.

Minimize Disruption

By offering a variety of authoring options including direct integration with Microsoft Word and Excel, research analysts can be up and running quickly with little to no training. In addition, the modern, open architecture of the Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution enables easy integration with existing business systems.

Reduce Errors

Eliminate copy and paste and rekeying errors to produce higher quality products. Ensure there are no inconsistencies between different research products by reusing the exact same “referenced” content in multiple locations and media types.

Time to Market

Enable analysts to publish research opinions faster by allowing them to focus on content – not formatting – while automating compliance, approval and production processes. This means more investment research published to more channels without increasing your resources. What’s more, creating and publishing information faster than the competition can lead to differentiated product service and superior value to clients.

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Customers

“It is essential that our authoring solution allows our international teams of analysts to quickly and easily create structured content within a tool with which they are already familiar, Microsoft Word. We chose Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution for this reason, because it allows for the reuse of that content through its underpinning XML structure and provides extensive integration into our data sources and workflow applications.”

“Our consumers are able to not just read our research, but engage with it through video, audio, exhibits and interactive content. With this investment research software, they know we are reacting to their feedback, and providing them with pertinent, timely and relevant information.”

“Being able to automatically tailor componentized content to the consumption preferences of our customers, and then receive analytical feedback to allow us to further optimize our research is a game-changer.”

“With Quark technology we could transform the industry, reimagine what we do and how we do it, delivering for our clients on a level no one dreamed possible.”

“Quark is leading the charge to move the industry from open standards for PDF publishing to standards based on HTML5. This new approach will help to both segment and target research content to individual investor preference as well as leverage delivery for a modern, digital, mobile format.”

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is your solution turnkey or must it be integrated into existing systems?

The Quark research authoring software is an out-of-the-box solution designed to meet the needs of most standard investment research publishing processes. The open and extensible architecture of the research platform provides the ability to customize functionality and integrate with external systems as needed.

Is your system hosted or on-premises?

The solution is available in both hosted and on-premises versions.

Can your solution manage research contributors who are distributed globally, without any user interface latency?

Yes, the Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution offers clustering and distributed, synchronized deployment for those clients with a global user base.

Do you support RIXML?

Do you produce automated charts?

Charts, graphics and data tables can all be produced using automated scheduling and dynamic assembly.

Do you integrate with Excel?

Quark’s publishing platform for investment research integrates with Microsoft Excel and other Microsoft Office applications. Both graphics and data can be brought into the solution from MS Excel and content can be automatically synchronized between the two applications, as selected by the research analyst.

Can you output to mobile devices?

Yes, output is available for all major device formats (iPhone, iPad Air, iPad mini, Kindle Fire, Samsung Tab etc.), device types (tablets and smartphones) and operating system environments (iOS, Android, Mac OS X and Windows). Content can be published directly to mobile from the automated authoring workflow or requested by the mobile consumer, on-demand. Customers have the option of native apps, Web apps or both.

Can you output to the web?

Automated compliance technology (with rule-based configuration) is included as well as a componentized disclosure repository for write-once-use-many ease of use and analyst affirmation tracking on a report-by-report basis.

Do you have the ability to deliver to content aggregators?

Extensive delivery options are available including support for pushing reports to multiple content aggregators.

Can you track readership of the distributed research?

Yes, readership data streams are available to integrate with standard third-party analytical engines, such as Google Analytics and IBM Analytics, among others.

Do you offer services to help set up and implement your solution?

Quark has an experienced professional services division, which is available to support the installation, configuration and implementation of any custom requirements. This team has worked within a wide variety of financial services and technology environments and has a deep understanding of the requirements for investment research reporting authoring and publishing.

We see that you are based in Denver, Colorado. Do you work with non-US-based clients?

Quark is a global organization with offices around the world. Many of Quark’s existing financial and non-financial clients are global organizations, each with their own unique needs, each of which is supported by Quark’s distributed sales, service and support organizations.

What do your support services look like?

Quark offers a variety of support programs that fill most standard business needs, for example 5x8 during local business hours in primary time zones. Should special support requirements exist, Quark provides customized support plans to meet each client’s needs.

How many customers do you have?

Quark has hundreds of thousands of customers around the globe spanning a wide range of industries and applications. The company has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software development, deployment and support.

How long has Quark been offering solutions in financial services?

Quark has been offering publishing solutions in the financial services industry since its inception more than 30 years ago. In recent years, Quark has specifically focused on the investment banking and asset management divisions as their needs have grown from traditional PDF publishing to include digital and mobile delivery, an area in which Quark has been recognized as a market leader.*

Do you work with partners?

Quark has an active partner community and has organized its relationships around strategy, technology, solutions and resellers. For more information on Quark’s partner program, please see the Quark partner page on our website.

Quark supports the latest version of the RIXML standard (v2.4). Further, Quark is very active in RIXML.org and plays a key role in its Emerging Technology and Componentization working groups.

Do you support component content management?

Component management is a pillar upon which Quark has built its latest publishing platform. Components are managed as independent pieces of content, each with its own security, lifecycle and publishing management. Components are assembled dynamically to create automated documents and then formatted to meet the requirements of each output channel (e.g. web, email, RSS feed, print, mobile, etc.). Quark is a leader in component content management within the dynamic publishing vendor community.

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Resources

Info Sheet:

Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution

The Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution streamlines the process of creating investment research and delivering it to PDF, email, the Web, tablets, smartphones and beyond. Download this Info Sheet to learn more about the benefits and capabilities of this industry-leading solution.

eSeminar:

The Big Breakup

Join representatives from Quark, RIXML.org and Standard and Poor’s for a discussion on how the financial services industry is adopting componentization and changing the way we create and deliver information.

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Tech Specs

Technical Overview

The Quark Investment Research Reporting Solution is comprised of a number of tightly integrated Quark products that all utilize state-of-the-art, standards-based technology such as service-orientated architectures, Spring Framework Java™/J2EE™and Web services.

The primary Quark products that form the basis of the Investment Research Reporting Solution are Quark XML Author, Quark Publishing Platform, App Studio and QuarkXPress. There is also integration to Microsoft Excel and optional integration to third party data feeds and enterprise content management systems. You can find out more about features and system requirements within the specific product pages.